Monday, September 24, 2012

104: BUILDING THE HOUSE OF THE LORD WITH CONCRETE?

Natural Stone vs Man-Made Concrete:

From the days of the Old Testament, the Lord has commanded His people to build temples, sacred structures where He could teach, guide, and bless them. Our Temples have always been a sacred building to symbolize our devotion to the Lord and a place where we make covenants with Him.

Symbolically, it has been important to use natural stone to build our temples.Stones have a special significance. In building of Solomon’s Temple, the people were commanded to bring “great stones, costly stones, and hewed stones, to lay the foundation” of the Lords house.

Similar to ancient times, Our modern temples have been constructed using stone. The Salt Lake Temple is built using large granite stone. The Ogden Temple as well as the Bountiful Temple are also built with granite stone. The St. George Temple is built from native red sandstone.The Manti Temple as well as the Logan Temple are both built with Limestone. Usually the stone used is native to the area surrounding the temple, the Draper Temple was built with white granite shipped in from China.

Yesterday at the Brigham City Temple dedication, Elder L Tom Perry stated in his opening remarks that we no longer build with stone, but use concrete now. Concrete is a manmade building material which combines cement, water and an aggregate (crushed up rock or sand).

We believe that Jesus Christ is the chief cornerstone of our religion. If a temple is oriented correctly, the cornerstone is on the southeast corner of the temple where sunlight will hit no matter the season. In memory of marking this sacred part of temple, the cornerstone, President Boyd K Packer ceremonially used mortar to put into place the precast concrete “cornerstone”. Mortar is not needed with concrete, but it was done only symbolically prior to the Brigham City temple dedication yesterday. Other things in the temple are administered only symbolically as well these days.

I am not sure, but my guess would be that we don’t use stone anymore because it is probably easier and more convenient to use concrete that having to use natural stone from the earth.

8 comments:

I attended the last session which ended badly. Allan Packer, son of Boyd K. Packer, was leading the Hosanna Shout and flubbed it. How can you flub up the Hosanna Shout?On the last refrain he only says Hosanna twice and then says "to God and the Lamb" while the rest of us are doing the third Hosanna and that throws the rest of the congregation off on the Amen. The volume of the congregation dies off and we all kind of mumble the Amen to ourselves. It's like we were all going...what happened?

Perhaps I'm probably being too nit-picky....but it made what was supposed to be the joyous culmination of the dedication into rather a downer.

Or maybe, (and I am a different person from Anonymous 1:59 PM) these concrete structures symbolically represent where we are as a People (building on the precepts of men). Maybe, this symbolism represents our status as a People because according to some much older, well trusted friends, we, the LDS People in Utah, have changed and no longer are as loving or caring of their/our neighbors or of their/our ward members as they/we once were.

Maybe more has changed in the last 20 years than just the firm foundation that we build our Temples upon.

Sort of like how we don't kneel as a congregation when the sacrament is blessed, even though that is exactly what the Lord says to do in the scriptures. When asked about that, President Joseph Fielding Smith said "it just wasn't practical." Yet our Catholic brethren, who will love to chide for being apostate, manage it just fine...

I guess it's one thing to change the Lord's program based on supposed revelation, but who can argue that it is a good idea to make changes based on convenience?

the following will not be good for a long time so listen to it sooner rather later LINK

notice Spencer's description (within the first couple of minutes of this recording) of the difference of his spirit passing through man-made object verses natural objects. I wonder what the effect of concrete has on spiritual workings?